Sunday, June 24, 2001

Are we building stuff? Oh, oh yes. I'm aware that there are several bugs and obviously needed enhancements that seem to have been around for longer than a moving-forward app would allow. There is a reason for this, and it is not that Blogger development has stagnated, as some may suspect, many dread, and others hope. (Not that it hasn't temporarily stalled once in a while in the last few months, as it took all my energy to keep the company solvent, from a financial perspective and/or put out fires of the server-sort, so people could continue to publish while we figure all this out. Something that still, on occasion, takes more time than might seem reasonable.)

I'm working on a Java (servlets and JSP) interface for Blogger. Currently, the main interface is built in ASP running on IIS/Win2k, with much of the back-end (well, the crucial bits anyway, such as file transferring and template rendering) running in Java servlets on Linux (though, being Java servlets, they do not require Linux). I'm working to replace the ASP part with Java, so the whole thing can be much more cohesive, portable, and cross-platformless bug-prone, more manageable, more scalable*. And, thus, opening up the now somewhat difficult possibilities of licensed, installable, or even desktop versions of Blogger. This is also why I haven't been improving or fixing bugs much that exist in the current interface. As annoying as it is, with my lack of development cycles, if I keep investing in that code base, I'm not, ultimately, going to get very far. I hope you understand.

*This is not to say, as would be the popularly accepted premise, that a "less bug-prone, more manageable, more scalable" version couldn't be built on ASP/Windows. I think it could. And probably more quickly, by me. However, it certainly wouldn't be as portable or cross-platform (or would it?). But I am finding Java to be superior for building this type of app, and I am less and less interested in being tied to Microsoft even if they do make one's life easier in some ways.